How to update your WordPress to 4.6

The latest version of WordPress is out now, so if you haven’t already, ’tis time to update…

We follow a standard procedure of:

Check you have ftp details to your server and/or access to your hosting control panel. Get this from your host provider – it is important to have this information. Do not think “But I will never need that” or “I would not know what to do with that anyway”. Get that information – it is important and will save you a lot of time and/or money if something goes wrong.

Take a full backup of your site. We like the UpdraftPlus plugin as that restores things nicely – and any backup is only as good as the restore results!

Now do the updates.

Within your Dashboard, go to Dashboard, Updates

We suggest doing the Theme updates first (that was necessary for all StudioPress Genesis themes this time around and makes sense too, unless your theme provider is suggesting otherwise), then the plugins and then WordPress itself. Go for it – it’s very simple these days.

Check everything is as it should be and that’s it, you’re done.

If you have any problems that is when you’ll want to already know your FTP information so that you can pop in to the server, move the plugins from /wp-content/plugins to a newly created folder/directory (perhaps wp-content/pluginstore) and then see if your WordPress site is happy again. This will usually sort things out and you can then pop your plugins one by one back to the /wp-content/plugins folder to see which breaks things and then you’ll want to find an alternative to carry out the function you need. This is all “in a nutshell” and if it scares the pants off you, give us a shout and we can help.

The following video includes the process for those using StudioPress Genesis theme framework:

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